"Good God!" I thought: "I
shall never win her love. All my journey is in vain, and all this
love-making." The scene before me was the most beautiful in shape and
colour I had ever seen; but I am in no mood to describe the
Leonardo-like mountains enframing the azure bay. The reader must
imagine us leaning over a low wall watching the sea water gurgling
among the rocks. We had come to see some gardens. The waiter at my
hotel had told me of some, the property of a gentleman kind enough to
throw them open to the public twice a week; and I had taken his
advice, though gardens find little favour with me--now and again an
old English garden, but the well-kept horticultural is my abhorrence.
But one cannot tell a coachman to drive along the road, one must tell
him to go somewhere, so we had come to see what was to be seen. And
all was as I had imagined it, only worse; the tall wrought-iron gate
was twenty feet high, there was a naked pavilion behind it, and a
woman seated at a table with a cash-box in front of her. This woman
took a franc apiece, and told us that the money was to be devoted to a
charitable purpose; we were then free to wander down a gravel walk
twenty feet wide branching to the right and the left, along a line of
closely clipped shrubs, with a bunch of tall grasses here and a
foreign fir there; gardens that a painter would turn from in horror.
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